After Adoption Law, Russia Debates Seizure of Children

By

Alan Cullison

Updated Jan. 23, 2013 9:29 p.m. ET

MOSCOW—The Kremlin's recent halt to adoptions to the U.S. has opened a rancorous debate that extends beyond the country's orphans—to the tens of thousands of other children who have been separated from their living parents and sent to state orphanages.

On Wednesday evening, Russia's government-run Channel One devoted an hour of prime time to a raucous talk show about an impoverished family that has become a reluctant national symbol of the issue.

ENLARGE

The interior of the home where Russian authorities seized children in December, from footage shown Wednesday on state-run Channel One.
Channel One - Russia

On Dec. 21, three Russian welfare officials entered a tumbledown log cabin occupied by Irina Voskresenskaya and her husband in a village about 120 miles from Moscow, according to social workers, a family friend and the televised account. Their four children—all under the age of five—were sleeping on dirty sheets or bare mattresses. While the temperature outside was minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), the wood-burning stove was cold because the family had run out of firewood, according to the welfare workers.

Welfare officials put Ms. Voskresenskaya and her two younger children in a hospital and sent the older two to an orphanage, according to regional officials and Vladmir Akimkin, a family friend and attorney. The welfare officials said they intended to ask a court to determine whether the family or an orphanage should get custody of the children, according to these people.

The seizure fell on the same day that Russia's parliament passed its law banning U.S. adoptions. The report and similar accounts have ripped the bandage off a long-festering question: Why does Russia have as many children up for adoption as the U.S., a country twice its size?

In Russia's vast and poor agrarian regions, which have largely failed to recover from the collapse of Soviet collective farms, unemployment and alcoholism are rampant. Many parents there leave infants at the hospital because they can't afford to care for them, especially if the children have chronic illnesses or birth defects.

But critics of Russia's orphanage system say the state also has enormous discretion on when to take children from their parents. A 2008 law strengthened the mandate by specifying that the government can take custody when parents are a hindrance "to the normal development of the child."

The wording gives government officials "a very broad mandate to take away a child," said Elena Alshanskaya, founder of a nonprofit group Volunteers for Orphaned Children. With Russia so far offering few subsidies to families who offer foster care, many such children end up in orphanages.

Ms. Alshanskaya and other critics say officials in the resource-rich country could take small steps, like helping to buy firewood. Instead, these people say, officials are spending money to put infants in dormitories, where every new child means an addition to orphanage budgets.

The Kremlin has promised new aid to families and incentives to adopt or become foster parents, under its "Russia Without Orphans" initiative. In an interview with a Moscow newspaper, President Vladimir Putin's adviser on child rights said one Siberian region, Kemerovo, has already pioneered some of the plans."If every region followed it, I assure you we will solve this problem in two years," the adviser said.

As for the recent seizure, the government was obliged to intervene, said Vladimir Babichev, a top welfare official in Tverskaya Region, where it occurred. Given the bitter cold, the matter would have ended in tragedy, he said in an interview. "The issue was saving their lives," Mr. Babichev said.

The family denied the house was dangerously cold, saying they had been burning trash but the fire had burned out overnight, according to Mr. Akimkin.

Russia has some 600,000 children not in parental custody—who live in orphanages, with foster families or relatives—the government says. About 80%, it says, have living parents. According Russia's education ministry, the number of children sent to orphanages fell to 82,200 in 2011, from as high as 133,000 in 2005. The reason for the reported decline wasn't immediately clear.

While many in Russia support the government's recent adoption ban, critics say it will make it that much harder to help some 120,000 children in Russia who are up for adoption. According to Russian government databases, there are fewer than 20,000 prospective families for these children inside the country.

Reports of official seizures of children, many of which couldn't be confirmed, have nonetheless struck a nerve. Russian news outlets have come alive with reports of abandonment and seizure of children. In the Ural Mountains, officials have threatened to confiscate children because a family's apartment is sparsely furnished, or the refrigerator is empty, one news site reported.

Ms. Voskresenskaya, a former dairy worker, met her husband, Alexei Zaitsev, while they worked on a farm, according to welfare officials in the region and Mr. Akimkin, the family friend and attorney. The couple settled in their village of Kuznetskov in part because the village administration offered them a vacant log cabin, these people said. Mr. Zaitsev earned about $600 a month as a handyman in the region, and the family was entitled to about $200 a year in government aid, Mr. Akimkin said.

The family appeared on welfare officials' radar in 2010 when their then-two-year-old son, Pavel, was hospitalized with burns after he sat in a bucket of water his mother had boiled on the wood stove to wash clothes, according to Mr. Babichev.

The late December seizure came to broader attention after Mr. Akimkin appealed to local authorities to return the couple's children, saying he would provide firewood and monetary help. Welfare officials refused, he said, saying the matter had already been referred to a court.

Mr. Akimkin publicized the issue in blogs and in local newspapers until the family was invited—along with neighbors, friends and the welfare officials who visited thehome—to appear on a state-run channel where such dialogue has been spare.

The studio audience of Wednesday's pre-recorded broadcast—a rambunctious, Jerry Springer-style talk show called "Pust Govoryat," or Let Them Talk—viewed images of the family's home, a dirty scene of bare beds, trash and a grimy bathtub filled with ice. Host Andrei Malakhov pointed a finger at the weeping 26-year-old Ms. Voskresenskaya, calling her a feebleminded drinker and "a danger to the life of her own family." An audience member shouted that the children shouldn't be returned to a pig sty.

Ms. Voskreskenskaya, now pregnant with a fifth child, sat mostly tongue-tied. Mr. Zaitsev said he loved his wife and his children even if they lived poorly.

The welfare officials who sought to confiscate the children, and the government, also came under fire. "Any man with dirty pants can have his children taken away," shouted audience-member Mikhail Bondarev. "In France, if you have three children, the state supports you."

Mr. Akimkin confirmed that the house and laundry often was dirty when welfare officials arrived, because the family simply lived under tough conditions. With no running water in the house, it was difficult to wash or dry laundry in the winter.

At the end of the show, the state welfare officials insisted they had done the right thing by seizing the children. But they also promised to reunite the family.

"It was really clearly hurting the mother to lose her four children," Mr. Malakhov, the host, said after taping. "But she has to show she has enough brains to fix her stove."

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